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Day 3-4: Snorkeling & Last Day Before Maui

 Dear Diary  6 Responses »
May 072013
 

We are now on Day 3  of our Hawaii Trip, which is a Sunday.

After a quick breakfast, we grab our snorkel gear and head west in search of Pupiku Beach. We end up walking about a mile or two…

On the way as usual, there are lots of chickens and roosters.

We also find this huge area that’s fun to explore. Lots of little pools of life, but make sure to watch out and not get hit by the incoming waves!

Pupiku Beach was a beautiful beach with lots of clean sand, beautiful water, a couple of monk seals, and lot sof family.

All of the photos below were shot with my new GoPro Hero 3 Silver Edition.

This photo had a red filter on~ But it isn’t very necessary here while snorkeling, unless we were diving deep underwater.

There were tons of fish and some corals. Nothing too amazing, but still fun to see nonetheless. Here’s a sample of some of the things we saw underwater while snorkeling.

While snorkeling, we also had the chance to see several sea turtles up close and personal! They actually came right up to the shore too.

I was so close that I could touch them, and I wanted to ride on them so badly, but I know I shouldn’t… haha.

See the sea turtle in action below!

I spy Sarah. Do you see me in the photo below?

Finally it’s lunch time! We grabbed some food at Joes. Apparently, this place is popular because people in Maui knew of it as well.

This has got to be one of the best calamari dishes that I’ve ever had!

Yummy beer to pair with all these foods.

My boyfriend ordered a burger, looks pretty good huh? Especially when you are starving.

I got the pulled pork… mmMmm, just look at that and imagine it smothered with all that sauce. gahhh~

No that was a lot of food.. But no worries, we walked it off during our journey back to the hotel. Although we did drink more back at our room..

We also went swimming in our hotel’s salt water pool. swim, tan, swim, tan, swim, tan.. until it got dark.

Afterwards we took another nap.. and for dinner, we decided to be college kids and eat instant noodles and junk foodz.. then pass out. Lol. This concludes day 3.

On Day 4 of Hawaii…

We packed our things and set off to play tennis!! I sorta wish I got a photo of this, but whats cool is that on the tennis court, there were lots and lots of slugs!! But these slugs were the most interesting slugs I’ve ever seen in my life! They looked just like leaves. No joke, exactly like them and it was so fun to watch!

Once we finished playing tennis, we headed over for some breakfast. There were lots of these cute birds that we didn’t see before in our Hotel. Which one is your favorite?

I ordered something simple for breakfast.. it was pretty bomb. Omelet and hash browns, oh my! 

By the way, I would like to add that the weather was beautiful today! Unlike the rest of our time in Kauai, which was raining on and off… So sad that the weather finally cleared up, but we are leaving for Maui! Haha, we have bad luck?

At our hotel we also found some bananas. Lollll~ This is just a silly picture. Enjoy!

Ok, thats about all I have for now! My next Hawaii post will be about Maui! And trust me, that part of the trip is a lot more interesting.. you’ll see why.. Hehehehe~

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xoxo Sarah

Day Two: Exploring The Coast & A Dinner Party

 Dear Diary  8 Responses »
May 032013
 

I just wanted to say… TODAY (5/3) IS MY OFFICIAL LAST DAY OF WORK!! Yay! I’m so excited for the things to come! Haha, okay that’s all. Now it’s Hawaii time!! Yeeeyuhhh~

So on Saturday we woke up early to set off to explore Kauai!

 It was actually very very stormy that morning in Kauai. There were crazy down pours and lightning that lit up the sky every which way, vertically and horizontally, and sometimes both at the same time. Also the thunder that followed the lightning was super loud that it felt like God was moving the mountains.

Because of the weather, we decided to eat breakfast at the hotel. We got the breakfast buffet which was yummazing!

Just outside of the buffet that we were eating at were swans and hundreds of koi fish. They were so beautiful out in the rain… I’m surprised that they didn’t get scared by the terrifying thunder. The whole time we ate breakfast, we watched the beautiful Hawaiian skys light up.

Luck seemed to have been on our side this day as the rain happened to clear up just as we finished up our breakfast. Seeing this chance as an opportunity, we decided to set out and explore East of our hotel.

Aren’t these rocks cool? They are volcanic rocks!!! 

We made our way down the beach and found a hiking trail that brought us up to the top of the cliff.

Here are some views looking down, left, and right from the cliff, isn’t it pretty?

Now we decided to get serious about hiking and set off on a 2-3 mile hike onward past the cliff.

Look how pale my skin is!! Look and remember this photo… because by the end of this trip, I’m a hell of a lot darker!!

On our way, I noticed lots of really neat rock formations. I wonder how many years it must have taken for these rocks to look this way??? It’s so beautiful.

Doesn’t this photo remind you of the TV series LOST? Haha, well I guess it was filmed in Hawaii.

We found and explored several tide pools along our hike with hermits, gobbies, starfish, and various other fish..

Eventually our hike lead us to this dirt path with lots of over grown plants covering up the path..

I really hated this part of the hike so much because you never know whats in the plants if you’re not from the area, and I was wearing shorts. Haha, and yea my top came off because it was very muggy.

Ekkk, and we discovered that the rest of the hiking path was covered with all of these spiders!! There were so many of them and I couldn’t take it anymore and I started screaming that I wanted to turn around and go back. No more adventure to the land of LOST.

So we made our treck back towards the hotel.. I managed to get this nice shot of our hotel from the same cliff that we originally started it.

After we got back to the hotel, we ended up showering and taking a nice nap. I love not having anything to do and being able to take naps in the afternoon. So nice~

After waking up from a nice nap, we got ready to go to the mandatory company dinner party. Before dinner started, everyone hung around the open bar again. God I love open bar -_-

This is my resort casual outfit~ Polo Ralph Lauren blue and white stripped strapless dress, tiffany blue purse from Nasty Gal, Wedges… uhhh the brand slipped my mind, but its from Nordstrom Rack. Haha, if you care at all, let me know and I’ll check (but doubt you do).

Here’s how the seating was at dinner.. long tables that seated 8 people each.

Before dinner, the company CEO gave a speech.

My go to drink~ Jack n’ coke *wink wink* Teewa. And look at em knives and forks!!

I was pretty makeup conservative this whole trip in Hawaii. I guess it felt weird to cake on makeup in a beach setting. Oh well, makes me sad that I dont look as cute in photos without my falsies.

Delicious appetizer! Shrimp skewers with pineapple.

Strawberry salad with cheese and nuts.

Mai Tais!!

Main entree was bomb! Amazing steak, jumbo shrimp, potatoes, and veggies.

Creme Brûlée for dessert.

After this extremely satisfying dinner and having gotten our fill on drinks, we headed back to our room for a bubble bath. Thus ends my night 2.

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xoxo Sarah

Day One: Arriving in Kauai, Hawaii

 Dear Diary  22 Responses »
May 012013
 

Hi everyone! I’m finally back with a post!

I have a lot of Hawaii photos from my dSLR, iPhone, and also GoPro. So I hope you don’t mind if I’m separating my trip into days. I’ll try to group up certain days or activities as best as I can though! There’s so much that I want to share with you guys…

Okay, lets begin!

I began to pack for Hawaii the night before. Theres something about last minute packing that I really like. Below is a little drawing that I made to help me prepare.

For the entire duration of the trip, we flew Hawaiian Airlines. We went on the plane so many times…

LA > Honolulu > Kauai > Maui > Kauai > Honolulu > LA

After two flights, we finally arrived in Kauai, Hawaii. We didn’t have a rental car so we had to take a taxi to our hotel at the Grand Hyatt.

The Grand Hyatt is amazing. Here’s my view when I first walked into the hotel. You can look all the way through the hotel towards the ocean. Yea, my photo sucks, but just close your eyes and imagine the beach right there in front of you.

To the left and the right of this grand entrance (pictured below is the right side) was this massive room for checking in and also signing up for activities and events.

Once we checked in, we were brought to our rooms. We got a king and queen size bed!

I loved this hotel because it’s the first one that I’ve been to that lets you drink all the drinks in the refrigerator without charging you!

The bathroom never looked so white the rest of the trip, lol.

Our little balcony… too bad it didn’t face the ocean. But our bell boy said, more reason to hang out by the pool or on the actual beach, right? He was so right.

The Grand Hyatt had the most beautiful pool facilities that I’ve been to thus far. With several different fresh water pool layouts, slides, jacuzzi…

lazy river that went everywhere…

and even their own salt water pool with real sand bottom… it doesn’t get much better. It’s actually so nice that you don’t even need to really go into the beach waters around here, haha. You can swim at their pools but still get a beautiful ocean view.

The first thing we did after arriving to the hotel and putting our bags down in our room was explore the premises. The hotel spreads across over 50 acres of land!

This is the Hawaii state bird, the Nene, which is a type of goose.

Another gorgeous view of the hotel!

Some other hotel guests caught us trying to take photos of ourselves and offered to take a photo for us. Haha, good idea. Too bad I look so nasty in all of these photos since we’ve been sitting on the plane all day and I have no make up on. I want to scratch out my face!

Right in front of our hotel is a beautiful beach. It’s soooo easy and effortless to walk to.

Though the beach is nice, I wouldn’t say its the prettiest beach that I’ve been to in Hawaii for swimming. But I think it’s just nice to have this view. There’s also tons of hiking trails right around the hotel as well, like the cliff in the photo above!

On a lot of the beaches in Kauai, we found monk seals, both black ones and white ones… simply laying on the sand sleeping. When they sleep, they sleep for hours and they do not like to be disturbed, so the locals put up fencing to keep tourists from bothering them.

Once we finished exploring the hotel premises and the beach infront of it, we headed over to the convient store and bought some Maui Brewed Coconut Beer and hung out by the pool and swam until dinner time.

One thing I really enjoy about Hawaii is looking at all of the interesting greenery. There are lots of trees that have these branches (sorta like roots) growing out of them and into the ground.

Us hanging around, haha.. yes I know too much PDA.

At night, we went to a welcoming reception. If you didn’t know already, part of this trip was paid for by Erick’s company. They paid for the round trip flights, 3 night stay at the Grand Hyatt in Kauai, and gave us $1000 spending cash. His company has an annual presidents club vacation trip for those who qualify, and this year they went to Hawaii.

At the welcoming reception they had complimentary appetizers.

These were my favorite of the appetizers, delicious egg rolls. I can’t even begin to count how many of those I had.

This was pretty good as well.

I’m not sure what this one is, but it has a little curry taste to it.

The welcoming reception also had an open bar. Sweeeettt.

We finished the night with drinks and good times. We also took all of our snorkel gear out to the lazy river and swam under water at night which was surprisingly fun! Well, fun until we kept swimming and started seeing couples doing stuff from an underwater perspective! Haha.

Well that sums up our first night in Hawaii!! Stay tuned to find out more on our Hawaii trip.

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xoxo Sarah

 

Why I’m Quitting My Job

 Dear Diary, Rant & Thoughts  20 Responses »
Apr 292013
 

It’s been over a week since I’ve last made a post on my blog. I must admit, I have been a tiny bit lazy, but also.. lots of things have happened very recently! And I’m talking about BIG things.

Just to keep you all in the loop a bit (until I can publish a Hawaii post), here’s whats up with my life.

  • Returned from my lovely week vacation in Hawaii last Sunday 4/21
  • I put in my 2-week notice to quit my ad agency job as a designer
  • Been hanging out with friends every single day that I’ve been back from Hawaii (you’ll find out why later)
  • My dad blacked out and collapsed again on 4/26 (this worries me a lot since he’s 80!)
  • Trying to catch up on a bunch of freelance work that was postponed because of Hawaii

Those are just some of the things that have been keeping me away from blogging. To be honest, I haven’t even started editing any of the Hawaii photos. I have so many to edit! All I’ve done was sort them into folders, lol.

Oh well. Anyways, I guess the biggest news is that I’m quitting my full time job. I think most people think I am crazy for doing this… But I like to be a risk taker.

Quitting a full time salary job makes me feel nervous, scared, and a little worried. I know lots of people who don’t even have a job, or let alone their dream job. I was lucky enough to have both of those. *sigh* Time for me to say good-bye to security, benefits, health insurance, and my pride in being an employed professional.

So why am I throwing it all away? It’s quite simple.

  • I want to be a risk taker and do what I won’t be able to do in the future if I had kids
  • I want to be able to see how I survive without the security of knowing that I’ll get a paycheck automatically deposited into my bank account every two weeks
  • I want to be able to devote more time to my blog
  • I want to travel while I’m young
  • I want to struggle a little
  • I want to simply live life

This marks a new chapter in my life.

 Have you ever taken a life changing risk? If so, what? Also, what things would you like to see me do while I am unemployed? Haha, and lastly, do you think I should start making youtube videos?

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Thanks for reading
xoxo Sarah

 

BirchBox + April Giveaway (Expired)

 Giveaways, Shopping  17 Responses »
Apr 202013
 

よ〜！Happy 420!

We are about half way through all of my BirchBox Mini-Giveaway Series! This is the 3rd giveaway out of 6 that I am hosting (one per month). If you would like to read more on my ongoing giveaway series, view my post here.

Now lets have a closer look at what came in this month’s box.

This box is my March BirchBox. I was actually supposed to do my February box, but I accidentally switched up the boxes and took photos of the wrong one. Haha, so I guess I’ll do this box first and the previous box next month instead.

I am quite excited for this box since the quality of the samples are a lot better than the last box that I gave away. This means you should be excited too because one of you will get to win most of these items!

Incoco Nail Polish Appliqué (Full-size $9-$11)
Eye-catching nail strips are the easiest way to get a flawless mani.

I love nail strips because they are so easy to use and nails look awesome after you’ve applied them. You get the vibrance and brilliance of liquid nail polish, without the drying time. Incoco Nail Polish Appliqué’s last up to 14 days and are free of dbp, toluene, and formaldehyde.

Madewell for Birchbox Emery Board (Full-size $5)
Birchbox teamed up with Madewell to create this adorable mani savior, patterned after a print from their new spring collection.

A perfect companion to the nail strips is this handy nail filer. You will need a filer to be able to apply your Incoco Nail Polish Appliqués. Birchbox was pretty smart to pair these two items up together. Also the cute floral pattern design is to die for!

Serge Normant Meta Revive Dry Shampoo (Full-size $25)
The A-list stylist created this volume-boosting mist to give second-day locks a lift. The subtle fragrance also leaves hair sweetly scented.

I’ve never tried a dry shampoo before, so I was quite excited to see this product in the box. To use, all you need to do is shake and spray about 10 inches away from your head. Spray your scalp and hair, focusing in on the roots. Let your hair set for two minutes and turn your head upside down and come through to remove excess powder. Afterwards you can style your hair as needed.

Caldrea Body Lotion (Full-size $22)
These elegant body lotions come in three ethereal scents: Tea Olive Lime, Aloe Water Apricot, and Coconut Fig.

Shea is good for deep hydration. Chia seed oil helps rebuild the skin’s own protection and fights free radicals with major omega-powers. Each of these lotions have a smooth and soft, yet clean feeling. All of these lotions are free of phthalates, parabens, formaldehyde, and artificial color. They are also vegan and not tested on animals.

No. 1 Aloe Water Apricot: Assured and easy, a modern white musk with florals and freshness.
No. 2 Tea Olive Lime: Green yet sensual, citrus is deepened with vanilla, orchid, and tea.
No. 3 Coconut Fig Leaf: Fresh yet exotic, easy sensuality balances juicy spice. Allure, worn lightly.

Whish Shave Crave Shaving Cream (Full-size $20)
The organic shea butter in this foam-free shaving cream makes for an insanely close shave and leaves skin incredibly soft. It is also exclusively scented with blueberry.

This shaving cream is a thick whip that helps provide a close and moisturizing shave. It’s made with natural ingredients to help leave your skin soft, smooth, and pampered. Their formula is moisture (natural squalene omega 3, organic shea butter), sooth (organic green tea, organic coconut oil), and nourish (organic jojoba seed oil). This product is free of paraben, sulfate, DEA, TEA, and petrochemicals.

This little card also came in the box with a special shopping offer. I’m not sure if it will be of any use, but I will just throw it in the box for the giveaway anyways, ha.

How to Enter
Leave a comment with the following:

For more info on my ongoing BirchBox Mini-Giveaway Series click here.
Thanks everyone for reading and participating! May luck be with you.
xoxo Sarah
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